Before the coming of the Metaverse, I restarted the DVD player!

When I was in my early twenties, I had a stable job in Taipei. One of my duties was to help my boss manage the website (starting from Jiazhan). At that time, I spent a lot of time thinking about what the "future Internet world" would look like. of? Twenty years later, almost all the world I imagined at that time has come true.

I didn't think too much about it. I once sketched the structure of the entire website, and I needed to upload a series of my boss's movies and dramas to the Internet to become a huge database, so that all movie fans or book fans can browse again. His works, even though many of them seem outdated and unimaginable after 20 years, are no longer moving, but they still have his work thinking and creative achievements at different stages.

Maybe my thinking went too fast or too forward at the time.

There was no audio-visual platform at that time, but everyone downloaded old and new film and television works that "couldn't find" or "not shown in theaters" using BT and donkeys to share resources with each other. On any platform without the concept of copyright, and so far.

I used to sit idle on the donkey website or major audio-visual forums to download Japanese dramas that were translated as soon as they aired, and find their favorite directors, screenwriters, Actor's film and television works, those that have not been released in Taiwan, are old, and are classics of the times... all lie on my hard disk, and I will laboriously find software from the rmvb file and convert them to DVD discs (or VCD pictures). quality) and then take it to a TV without a fourth channel to play it with DVDplayer.

Or, I will seriously sort by the number of Chinese characters, divide TV dramas into Japanese dramas and Taiwanese dramas like a library arrangement, put them one by one in the box of my DVD collection, and then list them in a table. Collection, by the way, I will list all the works I have seen myself.

This kind of downloading and sharing without the concept of copyright is indeed not a good behavior. After I was no longer a moonlighter and video streaming began to reverse our viewing habits, paying a monthly fee to watch and going to the cinema became my practice of "user pays". I have two paid platforms: My Video and Netflix, as well as Hami Video for my mobile phone number and Apple TV for three months when I buy a mobile phone. I will buy the movies I really like and collect them.

And a few years before the era of DVD and video streaming, I would go into DVD rental stores and stores that sell DVDs to find treasures, and collect those DVD films ranging from 29 to 99 yuan (there was a set of animations at that time) I bought it without the heart, and I still regret it: Naoki Urasawa's "Monster") Like those downloaded films, they were well kept in the corner of my home, and like all my books, I always thought in my heart: There will come a day when I will be old and have nothing to do, and I will take them all out to see. (Many of them are ones I've watched and bought on DVDs.)

In the follow-up to Crazy Mr. Sunshine, I began to look for old works of related actors on various audio-visual platforms, mainly Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-ri, to Byun Yoohan's early works, or screenwriter Kim Eun-sook's hot dramas. Kim Tae-ri's works are relatively new, I've seen almost all of them (I haven't watched "Victory" yet), and Bian Yohan's works have found a few works that won awards with him, but Lee Byung-hun's works are very old, although they are available on the platform, they are not available. I can't watch it on the shelf, so I turned to google to find a seller selling DVDs at auction! (Presumably the sellers of those rental shops.)

what! DVD! What a long time ago, I feel very courageous for the studios who release DVDs these days. New movies are often released on the platform in less than three months after they are released (A Tanger's is also on the platform~) Why release DVDs? But some old works are not available on the platform, so they have to buy DVDs instead, and then restart, I don't know if they can still be used, and even the remote control is missing DVD players!

Judging from my collection, there are a lot of films that are not on the shelves and I bought them for 39 yuan (eg: Lars Von Trier's "Dogville") or must pop up on the topic of the actor or director. On the shelves, such as Tom's "Vanilla Sky" and "Key Report", or you will suddenly see "Ahhh~~~ it's finally on the shelves!" Such as Ang Lee's "Lust and Caution" "This week, it has been on several platforms. Although I have a DVD, and I went to the theater to pay to watch it three times, I can broadcast it on-demand if the platform has it~~

Remember that the oasis of "Tier Players" (that is, the future metaverse world) can accommodate so much information? In the future world, can all those old works that are worth seeing again and again can be placed in the world's database and can be found at any time?

A few days ago, I got a new TV at home, and I remembered that I have a DVD player. In order to read the DVD attached to the original soundtrack of "Mr. Sunshine", I also searched for an external DVD player and played it on my computer.

Maybe it's a matter of time before entering the age of the metaverse. However, some works that no longer see the light of day may still need to be read by those old machines, in order to see more works that have not entered such a rich audio-visual age in the early days, and also to clearly see the changes of a creator, Growing up, or seeing film and television creations through different eras have different narrative methods and incorporate elements of different eras.

The online world I imagined 20 years ago should be less than the imagination of the metaverse, but it is close to the status quo of video streaming. The only difference is: I didn't expect that in today's day, I would rediscover the need for DVDs, so that I can see the works that are not available on the platform, but I want to watch.

Thanks to the crazy collecting habits of my youth, my DVD player still has a lot to do!

Picture: 20220826, a second-hand DVD that I bought, a hard-to-understand (and not necessarily to understand) old work of Chen Yingxiong, a collection of the movie "Phantom Rain Chase" by Josh Hartnett, Kimura Takuya, Li Bingxian, and Shawn Yue Ji" made me fall asleep, but my remote control was missing and I couldn't go backwards, so I kept watching. After reading it, I have only one experience, Chen Yingxiong's style is also a little different. He is also the director of Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Forest".